A Survey of Middleware Paradigms for Mobile Computing

Abstract

Current advances in portable devices, wireless technologies, and distributed systems have created a mobile computing environment that is characterized by a large scale of dynamism. Diversities in network connectivity, platform capability, and resource availability can significantly affect the application performance. Traditional middleware systems, like CORBA and DCOM, have achieved great success in dealing with the heterogeneity in the underlying hardware and software platforms, offering portability, and facilitating development of distributed applications. However, they are not prepared to offer proper support for addressing the dynamic aspects of mobile systems. Modern distributed applications need a middleware that is capable of adapting to environment changes and that supports the required level of quality of service. This paper represents the experience of several research projects related to next generation middleware systems. We first define middleware and indicate the major challenges in mobile computing systems. We then take a broader perspective and try to identify the main requirements for mobile middleware systems. Following this, we review the different categories of mobile middleware technologies and show their strength and weakness. We finally present a simples discussion on the surveyed work and provide a number of observations about the remaining issues. 1